ABSTRACT
It is not too much to suggest that however hesitant the actual beginnings, such a methodology implies not only a new history of women, but also a new history'. The way in which this new history would both include and account for women's experience rested on the extent to which gender could be developed as a category of analysis. Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict. The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence in binary gender representation. Historians need instead to examine the ways in which gendered identities are substantively constructed and relate their findings to a range of activities, social organizations, and historically specific cultural representations.
